Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

As other editors have suggested, there is no point in trying to fix anything now. Nothing can be done.

Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia; it is a grand social experiment. Experiments don't "fail" and I won't say WP is a failure. I'm not sure Jimbo had much of a goal in mind at the time of foundation so WP can hardly be said to have failed that, either. Various editors have had goals and some of them have been fulfilled; others have not. But WP was designed as a bus without a steering wheel and this cannot be bolted on retroactively. The experiment cannot even be terminated.

The results of the experiment, so far, are unastonishing:

• Humans, on average, are mediocre; if we are allowed to build without direction, we create mediocre works. If we are allowed to build for a long time, we create very large works, still, mediocre.

• Humans are contentious. We don't all agree on much; perhaps not on anything. We tend to meet disagreement with hostility and we would rather fight than compromise. We collude more than we collaborate.

• Humans are self-organizing and exclusive. Left to our own devices, freed of overlords and governments, we will create for ourselves the hells we have been spared. Given freedom, we enslave. If given a house of infinite size and no doors, we will erect doors, elect guards, and enact restrictions on entry, on movement, and on every activity. The house will be carved into gang territories, each bent on domination of the whole.

• Technology does not alter human nature. If you gather a large group of people on a plain with many stones and no plan, they will build a great heap of stones and many small, neat piles; but never a cathedral. If you gather a large group of people in a building with much high tech equipment and no plan, they will build a great, massive, inefficient machine and many small, neat toys; but never a Space Shuttle. If you gather a large group of people in cyberspace with many servers and virtual tools and no plan, they will build a great, huge pile of words and many small, neat process pages; but never an encyclopedia.

Those of us who wanted a free source of general information are content in inverse proportion to the standard of quality we desired. Those of us who wanted a society based on merit are disappointed. Those of us who wanted to build little cliques of ruthlessness are delighted.

WP cannot be fixed -- not the corpus of information, not the technology, not the community of editors. All suffer the accumulation of time. The editors who are most experienced with the technology are the ones who have invested most in creating and leading cliques. The technology which is most obscure shoulders the greatest burden of rendering the process workable. The sheer mass of information crushes any effort to improve quality or raise standards. And at this point, any initiative whatsoever will be hijacked by those who have the greatest skill at hijacking initiatives -- and the least interest in anybody else's goals.

Quite a few editors have seen all this and tried to start over again, elsewhere, with improvements of one sort or another. Many have seen the harsh truth: Humans are not basically good (or basically evil); we are mediocre in the mass. High quality and lofty goals must be built into a project at its very foundations; they cannot be expected to emerge, by magic, from ylem and chaos. These alternative projects have failed, or limped along on the margins, because the sheer mass and notoriety of Wikipedia excludes competition.

We have met the enemy and he is us.

The best thing that WMF could possibly do to further the stated goals of openness and, generally, breathing new life into the concept of a free, open encyclopedia would be to shut down Wikipedia. Get out of the way and let somebody else take a crack at it. Perhaps some other group will establish a project on a solid foundation, with some unalterable ground rules and some real leadership. If not today, then perhaps tomorrow.

However, even this is quite impossible. WP cannot be fixed; it cannot even be destroyed from within. The Tower of Babel was not torn down by repentant creators; it was destroyed by an external force. Eventually, one might hope, an external force will destroy WP. Until then, we all must suffer in the hell we have constructed for ourselves.

I did not get it: you are for or against freedom?

Anyway, I found many good articles on Wikipedia and this is why: the sources make the article. No sources, bad article; many good sources, good article. Of course, this is somewhat of an over-generalization.

Your points are insightful.

The truth (such as it is) is out there. But in many articles in WP it does not seem to be there. Dispelling myths is good. Repressing those who know something? I would agree with the original author of this piece. WP is not about sharing but regression to the mean (whatever that is). One of the reasons why I left as a contributor is that I prefer to work in an enviroment where my contributions are reviewed by my peers rather than "anybody". Good luck WP. It is still a good idea. But wether it will succeeed? Only time will tell. 83.160.198.125 22:05, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Xiong, Great analysis. I love the smell of jaded cynicism in the morning. Your philosophical views remind me of the parable of heaven and hell - we have the opportunity to use the technology (long spoons) to help nourish each other, but the problem, as Rabbi Haim astutely points out, lies in how we treat each other. Geoffjw1978 01:28, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Hope is a knave befools us evermore

Which till I lost no happiness was mine.

I strike from hell's to grave on heaven's door:

All hope abandon ye who enter in.

-- Beckett, translation of:

L'espérance n'est qu'un charlatan qui nous trompe

sans cesse. Et pour moi, le bonheur n'a commencé

que lorsque je l'ai eu perdue. Je mettrais

volontiers sur la porte du Paradis le vers

que le Dante a mis sur celle de l'Enfer :

Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

-- Nicolas Chamfort

I quite like Wikipedia and don't expect it to be anywhere near perfect.

Excellent, and I'm dying of envy this tower of thoughts isn't built by me. Except that I think the WP may has became too big and worldwide network is really worldwide. There will be no external force, as long as there is no external space. May be WP will become a stone that humans can't lift. It would be quite interesting, though there is always outer space than one can imagine.

Xiong Talk - Well said. Though quoting the sign on the entrance to hell is pretty pessimistic don't you think? I have to admit, I have only briefly attempted to edit pages in Wiki and found myself quickly challenged, "undone", and threatened by the persons who had spent the most time building these same pages. After about 6 days using various constructs and approaches attempting to correct the same simple paragraph, I realized I had entered some kind of hell. The pride of ownership can be a hellish thing to encounter. No amount of citations and truth seems to assuage the desire to destroy any challenger, no matter how well armed that challenger is with the truth and with authoritative citations. One's intellectual baby cannot be corrected or you will have hell to pay. Let the truth be damned.

I think the solution is a referee. I had attempted to engage some disinterested third parties as observers or referees to instill a sense of truth and fairness, but none wanted to get involved. Their disinterest was the very thing that made them spend no time at all on my dilemma. Wiki has been built by people with a passion for their subject, not necessarily a passion for the truth or fairness about all subjects.

So if Wiki is going to survive and be respected, it seems that there need to be people who will take the time to referee edits, who are skilled editors and writers themselves, and who DO NOT AUTHOR these same pages BECAUSE they are engaged as referees and must remain truly neutral. Their only role is in ensuring that claims have been properly cited and are appropriate to the topic at hand. And they should be skilled enough in Wiki markup to fix the technical markup without casting out the intellectual property due to technical markup errors. Along with this, there would need to be random audits of the referee's decisions to ensure that they are truly neutral.

As others have observed, declaring markup errors or policy violations is the current favorite tactic for protecting one's passionately held though mediocre intellectual baby. Some common tactics: a) Declare a technical markup error and send the editor back to study the markup language, b)Keep undoing the edits and threaten that the new editor will be blocked because they have created an "edit war" which is against the policy, c)Throw out citations as against the citation policy, d) Refuse to read the citations and continue to claim the citations are missing. I had one example of an editor who insisted that the documents from the Bishops and the Vatican were not authoritative sources on what the Roman Catholic Church believes and therefore did not meet the criteria for the citation policy. Really? He insisted on citing an anonymous web author who claimed to be a Catholic somewhere in the U.S. and he continually undid my attempts to cite official Vatican documents and Bishop's letters. I had met a real "devil's advocate" in this Wiki hell.

Most new editors who know they are right and on the side of truth won't bother with this childish behavior. These tactics are an extremely effective deterent to acquiring or retaining new editors, particularly those who know the subject they are editing and don't really care about Wiki's success, accuracy, internal policies, or markup language. We can publish in other publications and respected journals in much less time. And the Wiki mediocrity will continue until there are neutral referees truly committed to publishing what is true.

There is more than a little truth here. Indeed, I am wondering if Wikipedia has not passed its peak already when it comes to quality: there is a lot of persistent garbage and it does not appear to be decreasing (one can remove misinformation, but it always appears to return). The www is full of junk, and it appears to drifts into Wikipedia again and again.

On the upside, cathedrals were built using not all that much in the way of planning. They were built by craftsmen, under whose hands the cathedral grew organically. However, many a fine cathedral has been destroyed by envious people ("not our cathedral!"). - Brya 10:42, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, it does take time, decades/centuries. I saw a great comment from w:A_C_Grayling on development of knowledge gathering - "At times sceptical challenge has been seen as a serious threat to the project of attaining knowledge."^[ref1] He was talking about progress in the middle-ages. It appears Wikipedia finds itself maturing through its own dark ages. Just a few centuries for you to wait. A lot of the user talk pages I have visited have a finality to them with a shared common experience of their work deleted over time.

Suggestion: The "no loss of knowledge when editting" campaign should get higher visibility.

[ref1] Ideas that matter, by A C Grayling (2010), Page 168.